When you get charged with a crime in this country, you have the right to your day in court. But, more often than not, you won't get that far.

According to an article in the New York Times, the vast majority of felony cases nationwide end in a plea bargain before trial begins.

"Plea bargains have been common for more than a century, but lately they have begun to put the trial system out of business in some courtrooms," wrote Richard A. Oppel Jr. "By one count, fewer than one in 40 felony cases now make it to trial, according to data from nine states that have published such records since the 1970s, when the ratio was about one in 12."

Washington state appears to be somewhere in the middle. So far this year, 26,591 criminal cases have been filed in Superior Court. Of those, 1,100, or about 1 in 26, have actually seen trial.

"The reality is that the vast majority of cases are concluded by plea bargain," said Mary Fan, an assistant professor of law at the University of Washington and a former federal prosecutor. "In many jurisdictions you may have sort of systematic procedures to offer plea bargains, almost like an assembly line."

Our judicial system is so overloaded, said Fan, that plea bargains are seen as a quick way to avoid the time and cost associated with going to trial. And in recent decades, she said, tougher sentencing laws have given prosecutors more tools to leverage a plea.

"Guilty pleas have become a powerful way of doing triage," she said. "Defense attorney often say that this comes at the expense of people making fully informed and free judgments about their fate."

While a plea deal can be a welcome break for those guilty of a crime, some say it robs those who are innocent of their chance to prove it in court.

"It's very difficult to admit that you did something you didn't do," said Kurt Boehl, a Seattle criminal defense attorney. "We see this more and more with these type of plea bargains, these types of tools that the prosecution is now using to essentially coerce these pleas so that they don't have to spend money going to trial regardless of what the truth is."

Boehl said nearly 100 percent of his cases begin with some sort of bargaining or offer from the prosecution. If his client rejects their offer, he said, the state will typically make the charges against the defendant more severe by amending the charge to a higher degree or adding some sort of enhancement.

"All of these things, my client would be looking at doing substantially more jail time," Boehl said, which makes rejecting the offer more difficult. "It's frustrating for me to know that my client didn't commit an offense but he's entering a plea so that he won't have faced a more serious offense. I don't think that that's justice."

Brandi Kruse, 97.3 KIRO FM

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